


Déjà Vu

by Nitrobot



Series: Men are from Mars, Women are from Klyntar [2]
Category: Spider-Man (Comicverse), Venom (Comics)
Genre: Blackmail, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 03:47:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15548922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nitrobot/pseuds/Nitrobot
Summary: The short story of why Spidey hasn't run into Venom much in his recent series, and how Eddie managed to keep him off his back.(Takes place after Venom Vol. 3 #6)





	Déjà Vu

**Author's Note:**

> I threw this in with my AU where the symbiote convinces Eddie (and itself) that its female cause Peter being grossed out by it will never fail to amuse me  
> (I still need to actually write him into my current crop of stories in this series, but it'll come eventually. This is just a oneshot spin off of sorts)

Two muggings, a carjacking, Shocker almost frying himself during another failed diamond heist (whoever’s idea it was to build a gem refinery right next to a water tower deserved a raise), not to mention all the jaywalkers he had to pull off the road before they got pulped into the asphalt…

And it wasn’t even midnight. He was starving, too!

Sadly Peter’s suit didn’t have much in the way of storage, other than his camera. All he had was a single candy bar in the closest of his snack caches spread high all over the city, one that he had to pray wasn’t half melted or stolen by birds. But it wasn’t! Finally, something to enjoy about the night!

Poised on top of the flattest roof he could find, he pulled his mask up so his mouth was free and prepared to take the biggest bite he could manage… but then his stomach flipped. Jeez, he hadn’t thought he’d left it there for that long. Did chocolate even go bad?

No, it wasn’t that... he was falling. In fact, he was three seconds away from hitting the floor. He spent two of them trying to shoot a webline to safety, but he was so disoriented all he managed to do was web the candy bar to his hand. Well, at least he wouldn’t drop it.

That left the last second to be full of pain. Even when he was braced for it, his skull still rattled as he crashed against solid ground. Concussion was just what he needed when he didn’t even know what had thrown him down. Fighting off the ebbing nausea, Peter willed himself to his feet and stretched his spider-sense as far as it would go…

But he sensed nothing. In fact, he hadn’t even succeeded in standing up. Something was holding him down… a pressure on his throat, not squeezing or threatening but firm enough to make itself known. He could feel his arms flailing, trying to fight off the chokehold but it wouldn’t budge.

When his vision finally cleared, he first realized that it wasn’t a floor against his back, it was a wall. He then realised who was holding him there, and that where he’d fallen wasn’t just a very very dark room. In fact it was a construction site, the concrete landing open to the elements and letting in a stream of moonlight that highlighted the oily black creature almost strangling him.

“ **Parker**.” Venom lashed his tongue as he hissed, forcing Peter to flinch away from the drool that flew out.

“N… nice to… see you too, Eddie.” Peter struggled more to speak than to breathe around the giant claws trapping his neck (thank god his mask was still partly up). Venom growled, the massive arm holding him up tensing even tighter, but before Peter could even start planning an escape he was suddenly dropped to the floor. Now his neck _and_ his butt hurt… he tried to ignore it as he shot up his free arm to hit Venom in the back with a web strike, but the alien was even quicker. Black webbing caught him on the wrist, blocking any quick access to his webshooter. Peter was almost about to tear at it with his teeth, when he had his third realisation.

Venom wasn’t trying to kill him. In fact, he wasn’t even facing him.

“ **Don’t bother trying to get away** ,” the villain said, arms crossed over the huge white spider on his chest. “ **We’re not here to fight**.” As if to prove it, he pulled the symbiote back from his head. Without the glistening ugly sneer, curled eyes and snaking tongue, Eddie almost looked bored.

Well, that was his own fault. He hadn’t let Peter put up much of a fight. “Considering you just _slammed_ me out of the sky, I find that a little hard to believe...” Peter still worked at clawing his webshooter out of the mess, just case this meeting wasn’t as friendly as Eddie made it seem.

“Force of habit.” Eddie shrugged, refusing to make it into an apology for taking away his downtime. “I’ll get to the point, Peter. We wanna make a deal with you.”

If Peter’s eyes weren’t still covered, his confusion would have been obvious in them. “You’re not usually the negotiating type.”

“And your brains should’ve been splattered on that wall a long time ago, yet here we are.” The symbiote swelled slightly around Eddie at the threat, as if it considered going through with it. “Funny how life turns out.”

Peter sighed, wishing he’d just taken the night off. “Alright, what kind of ‘deal’?”

“A simple one. Might sound familiar to you.” Eddie knelt down to make himself level with Peter on the ground- well, that was the intention, but he was still twice as large.

“You leave me and my symbiote alone,” he ordered. “You don’t interfere with us, you don’t get in our way, and you stick to _your_ side of the city. Got it?”

He was right, it _did_ sound familiar. It was the exact same deal they’d made just before Venom relocated to San Francisco. And, as much as he hated to admit he was wrong, Peter was the one who ended up breaking it. But that was when he was desperate enough to even make a deal to get this psycho off his back. Now he was trying so, so hard not to laugh in the much larger and scarier man’s face, in case it got even more scary.

“You’re kidding, right? You know you’re a fugitive for breaking that thing free in the first place?” He pointed to Eddie’s chest, and the symbiote seemed to shy away at even being near its very first host. The large scary man was not happy about that- he grabbed Peter’s hand and could have easily crushed it right there.

“You’re right,” Eddie said, shoving the hand away from him. “Which means we have nothing to lose by tearing your ribs open.”

Peter snatched his hand back as soon as it was free, popping his fingers back into their sockets. He wasn’t scared of broken bones, he _was_ scared of his shooter being smashed before he could use it. “Yeah, about that, Brock… have you ever actually _done_ anything you’ve threatened to do? Cause I’ve yet to see an epidemic of spines being torn out, or lungs pulled through nostrils.”

“Do you really want to be the one to find that out?” Eddie asked, daggers practically flying out of his narrowed eyes. Peter had gone against Venom and worse countless times, faced down death even more often, but that look on his face…

He knew that pissing him off any further wasn’t a good idea.

“Point taken,” Peter relented. “Now it’s my turn- and brace yourself, I’ve got _bullet_ points.” He counted them off on his hand while the other, still with a candy bar glued to the wrist, tried to pick his webshooter free.

“Number one; as you’re a _criminal,_ I _can’t_ just say yes and let you walk free. Or… swing free, whatever. Number two; you’re insane. Number three; the last time you had the symbiote, you…” He remembered the thing about pissing him off even more just in time. “Well, uh... the less said about that, the better.”

Or maybe he caught it slightly too late. “About _what_?” Eddie asked. Peter couldn’t tell if he was just speaking very slowly or if he only sounded that way because it might very well be the last question he’d ever hear.

“About… um… a-about you… thinking the symbiote was… uh… never mind. Not important.” Peter shook his head, not even wanting to relive finding out that Eddie was convinced the symbiote was female… or the implications. Eesh.

“Now, where was I… number four!” He thrust four fingers out as emphasis- better than three! More than enough to not strike a deal with a psychopath! “Even if _you_ think you mean well, Eddie, having a volatile symbiote latched onto you could land you in some _bad_ situations. Like, ruined city, mass murder situations.”

Eddie’s face twitched, a hidden nerve accidentally struck. “You’d rather she was with that government bitch _Thompson_ again?”

‘ _Oh Christ, he_ still _thinks it’s a woman…’_ Peter forcibly cleared his throat, trying not to think too much about it. “If the government is what it takes to keep it under control… look, Eddie, I… I get that you think you can keep yourself in check with your symbiote. But the fact is, you’re dangerous. That _thing_ is dangerous-!”

“She’s not dangerous when she’s with _me_ ,” Eddie cut in, while the suit warped around him. Almost as if it was hugging him close.

“There you go again, calling it “she”,” Peter groaned. “We’ve been over this, Brock, it’s an alien! It’s-”

He never got to finish that sentence. He was being strangled again, but not by an impossibly huge hand. This noose was thin, like black razor wire that whipped around his neck and constricted before swelling over his skin like a coffin cast. In his suspended state, Peter could see that the attack wasn’t coming from Eddie, not as far as he could tell. The symbiote was acting on its own… and it didn’t like what it had heard.

That only proved Peter’s whole point about it being dangerous, but he was hardly in a situation to be smug about it.

“I m-mean… s-she’s...very... lucky to have you... looking out for her.” The noose melted away, and he leapt up onto the wall as soon as he was free, away from any other sneaking tendrils. The one that almost hanged him retracted along the floor and whipped back to join with the rest of itself spread across Eddie’s body.

“You brought that on yourself, Peter,” he chided, standing up now that the spider was staring down at him. “You should know better than to talk about a lady like that.”

Peter could hardly quip back when he was still rubbing his bruised neck while sucking down air. When Eddie attacked he hadn’t meant to hurt him, only weaken and restrain him. The symbiote would have gladly killed him if he’d stayed silent, and Eddie would hardly have stopped it.

...Or maybe the only reason it didn’t is because Eddie _told_ it to stop. Regardless, Peter didn’t like the dangerous alien being bonded with the unstable workout nut.

“That _lady_ ,” he said, stalling as he came close to tearing the webbing on his wrist off, “has killed dozens of people, just because you told it to!”

Eddie rolled his eyes and scoffed, turning his back on him in disgust. “Don’t insult us, Parker. I don’t _tell_ her to do anything she doesn’t want to.” A tendril reached up from his shoulder to brush against his cheek, as if the symbiote was agreeing.

“So… you admit that you two can’t be left unsupervised!” Peter insisted, gritting his teeth as he ripped his wrist free of the last of the black webbing.

Eddie shook his head, oblivious to the fact that he was about to get a web shot to the back of it. “Even if you don’t agree with us, we can get you to play along anyway.”

“Oh really?” Peter lined up the shot, waiting for the device to take the few seconds needed to prepare a tiny web-missile. “And how’re you gonna pull that off?”

Eddie laughed as he raised a hand, jagged claws making some kind of gesture. “Pulling _this_ off is as easy as pulling that mask off.”

“...What?” Peter’s hesitation cost him dearly- his mask was yanked off fully by a tendril he couldn’t sense, while another snatched his camera from the zippered pocket at his ankle. “Hey, what the?!” By the time he realised what had happened, he was already blinded by a flash that caught him red-and-blue handed.

“You really outta leave the camera at home for once,” Eddie scolded, grinning as his symbiote delivered his blackmail evidence into his palm. He turned around before Peter could try and sling it back with a webline, so he only managed to hit his broad back with a string that refused to budge. Dammit, had the tensile strength of the fluid been damaged with all the alien web in the mechanism?!

“Now what would New York say if they saw someone not only wearing the spidey costume, but hanging off the wall with no supports?” Eddie checked the digital screen while Peter tried to charge at him, who only succeeded in running right into his other hand as it kept him away.

“Oh, look at that! We even got your webshooters in the shot! Maybe I went into the wrong career after all.”

When a man was able to sound that smug, one had to admit that he had just won. Peter scrabbled to free himself from Eddie’s grip, just in time to see his camera disappear inside the symbiote’s mass.

“You’ve known for _years_ who I am, and only _now_ do you do anything with it?!” Of all the people who accidentally knew his identity, Venom was strangely the one of the few he thought it was safe with.

“Didn’t have much reason to until now,” Eddie answered. What the hell had happened that suddenly made him play the one hand that he had over Peter, all just to get some privacy?

...Actually, where this guy was concerned, he really didn’t want to know.

“B-But… what about competition!?” Peter tried. “You said you wanted to kill me yourself without everyone else out for me!”

Eddie looked to the side, as if hearing a voice next to his ear, then shrugged. “It’s been like ten years, Pete. We’re over it.”

More like thirty, actually, but that was hardly the important thing here. “Son of a…” Peter pressed his sigh of defeat into a hiss through his gritted teeth.

“So? Do we have a deal?” Eddie already knew what the answer was, cause he hadn’t given Peter any other choice. He just wanted to hear it for himself so his ego could explode.

“...Can I at least have my camera back?” Peter asked. It was an older model, sure, but it had all his vacation photos!

Eddie once again inclined his head, listening to invisible input before answering.

“No.” He shot out another web, this time snaring Peter’s other, still-gummed wrist to tear the trapped candy bar free. “We’ll take that, too. She’s hungry.” He devoured half of it in one bite before he took off, leaping into the open air and swinging out of sight before Peter was even ready to pursue him.

They hadn’t fought, like Eddie had promised, yet he still felt like he had his ass handed to him. Not only that, if he and his alien went rogue there’d be nothing he could do to stop them.

And, worst of all… _he lost his candy!_ To a manipulative little alien and its bully boyfriend!

...Yeah, he was never gonna get used to that.  
“I’ve gone against a guy flying around gassing people on a glider, a lizard man, a rhino man and even a dinosaur man, yet the one in a happy relationship with an alien is what freaks me out...” Peter tried to find his mask before anyone else came along trying to plaster him all over the headlines come morning.


End file.
